As far as I can tell, when I close the lid on my Dell Win7 laptop, it stays on until the battery dies. Then I have to reboot when I plug it in. How do I fix this behavior?
You’re right that your Dell laptop is behaving poorly and it is indeed possible to configure a Windows 7 system to ignore when the lid or screen is closed, which produces the exact symptom you’re seeing: the device keeps running until the battery is completely drained, at which point it dies and requires a hard reboot. Worse, if the computer happened to be writing the disk just as it died it could actually corrupt your boot disk and lose all your data too, which would be worse than having to plug in a battery to recover!
Fortunately like all Windows systems, Win7 allows you to fine tune the behavior associated with your laptop pretty easily. In fact, there’s a really handy shortcut from the Desktop that lets you get to the right spot in your Dell laptop configuration quickly.
On the right side of your Taskbar look for the battery icon:
See it? In this case my laptop is plugged in, so there’s a tiny plug adjacent to the battery as it charges. If you’re just running on battery, the tiny electrical plug won’t be present.
Click on the icon and a helpful window pops up:
Click on “More power options” on the bottom for the super-useful shortcut.
There are a number of useful settings here, but you want to look closely on the left. I’ve underlined it: Choose what closing the lid does.
Click on that option to see how your system’s set up:
Notice the third option! “When I close the lid”, then the first entry is what happens if you’re on battery, and the second entry is what happens if you’re directly plugged in to a power source.
The options for each? Here’s the list:
My guess is that your system is configured to “Do nothing” when you close the lid. Change that setting, save the changes, and you should be good to go!
And what if changing the power settings doesn’t let it enter sleep mode? I can induce sleep mode through the start menu, but can’t wake it up or put it to sleep by opening and closing the lid. Please do not act like this is the one and true answer – a good troubleshooter would have considered multiple possibilities.
Not sure about the basis of your tone, Hannelore, but you’re right, there are always edge cases when it might be hardware issues, a faulty close sensor, a driver that’s messed up, etc. What I suggest, however, is going to cover the vast majority of the situations. In your situation, I would have someone check your hardware to see if there *is* a lid state sensor and whether it’s functioning correctly.
I followed the directions on this site which were very good but I don’t have a “sleep” option. I only have a blank, and my two options are “do nothing” and “shut down”. I don’t have a “sleep” option and my computer used to “sleep” every time I closed the lid. Any ideas ??
My Dell XPS14Z goes to sleep when I close the lid but wakes up again after a few minutes, and stays woken up. WIFI is turned off. I’ve checked the settings for lid closing and they are all set to sleep. I’ve checked wake on lan settings and set them to OFF – but it even happens when it’s completely disconnected from the LAN (unplugged and wifi off). It just started happening last week, about the same time as it started to shut down if I tried to put something in the USB port – which appears to be broken.
Any chance that it’s the result of the broken USB port? I have my wireless mouse thingy plugged into the port right now. It works but I’ve been told not to remove it (by a relative who is fairly tech savy) because it may not work next time.
Ideas??
Sure sounds like the wireless mouse is what causes it to wake up. Easy to test: Just unplug the USB adapter and see what happens. There’s no reason that it shouldn’t work the next time you start up your machine and re-plug in the receiver…
I unplugged my wireless mouse thingy and turned the mouse off as well. It still wakes up within 3 minutes of going to sleep. I hear a “zip” noise when it wakes.
I found this other site that suggested checking to see what was triggering the wake by using the command powercfg -lastwake. It says it’s:
type – wake timer
owner – [service]/device\harddiskvolume3\windows\system32\svchost.exe\.
whatever that is.
I have one harddrive. I checked its properties and it shows two volumes. OS (c:) and Recovery (F:),
there are two other drives that show on ‘my computer”
Recovery (f:) and Microsoft Office Click to Run 2010 (protected) (Q:).
The latter has access denied.
The former has two folders $Recycle.bin and Recovery.
Both have been there from the start. The problem only started a week ago.
The only other thing that is new is a system tray notification for “get windows 10”.
There is also a DVD drive. When I click the properties for that drive, having accessed it from the “hardware” tab of C: drive properties, I hear the same “zip” sound. If I access it via “my computer” properties hardware tab, the “zip’ sound doesn’t happen. In my computer it has it grouped by itself, and not with the hard drives.
So if a wake timer for harddiskvolume3 is waking up the computer and it makes a zip sound when it wakes, and the only drive to make that zip sound is the dvd drive (which is empty) all I can ask is why the pc has all of a sudden started checking the dvd drive?
I had this problem on my gateway w/windows 7. I first noticed this after running an aggressive antivirus application. I tried several variations of the advice above, but to no avail. Then I tried it using a slightly different path. Click on the battery icon then select “More power options”. Then select “Change when the computer sleeps”. Select “Change advanced power settings”. From the power options menu scroll down to “Power buttons and lid” and click on the + tab. Then click the + tab for “lid close action”. When I did this it said “Do nothing” even though I’d set it for sleep through the closing the lid options as advised above. I simply changed the “Do nothing” to “Sleep” and did a restart. Don’t know if there was some sort of a settings corruption by the antivirus or what, and one would think that if you changed the lid closing action in one part of the settings configuration of the power plan it would change in another, but that was the solution that worked for me at any rate.
Hi, I had that same problem with my Alienware M15x when I closed the Lid it wouldn’t go to Sleep and I usually have it plugged in all the time except when I take it out of my house. I made that change but than when I open the Lid it doesn’t automatically wake up, I have to push the Power Button to turn it on again.
Might want to try the “Change when the computer sleeps” option from the same menu above. Then select “Change advanced power settings”. The Power options menu will appear, scroll down to “Power buttons and lid”. Click the + tab and then the “Lid close action” tab. If it says “Do nothing” you’ve found your issue, just change it “Sleep” and then do a restart. It sounds counterintuitive that changing options in one part of the Power plan settings menu doesn’t change the same options in other parts, but that’s exactly what I found to be the case in mine. Good Luck!!!